Award-winning Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof says he has fled the country after being jailed for secretly making his latest film.
He posted on Instagram that he was now in a “safe place” after people “risked their lives” to help him cross the border.
His film “The Sacred Fig Seed” will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, which opens on Tuesday.
Rasoulof won the top prize at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival for “Without Evil,” a film about the death penalty in Iran.
“I am grateful to my friends, acquaintances and people who were kind, selfless and sometimes risked their lives to help me leave the border and reach safety after a difficult and long journey,” he wrote in a post on Monday. .
“I can confirm that Mohammad Rasoulov has left Iran and will attend the Cannes Film Festival,” his lawyer Babak Paknia told AFP.
The Iranian authorities tried to force him to ask organizers to withdraw “The Sacred Fig Seed” from the event, but he refused to do so.
Rasoulof, 51, gave no details of his escape route. He also posted a video of snow-covered mountains, suggesting he crossed the border into Iraq or Turkey with the help of smugglers.
Last week, the court sentenced him to eight years in prison for “collusion to endanger national security.”
“The scope and intensity of the repression has reached brutal proportions, and every day people expect news of another heinous government crime,” he said in a statement posted on Instagram.
Rasoulov has had numerous run-ins with Iran’s Islamic courts. In 2019, he was sentenced to one year in prison for his film “The Right Man,” which won an award at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival.
After “No Evil in 2020,” the director was sentenced to one year in prison for anti-government propaganda.
